The Civic Turn in Immigration and Citizenship Policies in the Nordic Welfare States

This article provides a state of the art overview of the scholarly discourse on civic integration generally as well as previous relevant studies on the Nordic welfare countries. Particularly, we discuss how to understand the concepts of ‘civic integration’ and ‘national models’ and how different definitions and choice of policies to focus on may provide different conclusions about convergence or divergence in West European citizenship politics. We highlight how use of civic integration policies may continue to reflect path-dependencies that, again, reflect the uniquely structured institutions and national discursive spaces of particular nation states – or conceptions of national identity and societal community – which, seen from the outside, might otherwise look alike. In this respect, we argue that comparative studies of the Nordic states can be seen as laboratory where we can study how the civic turn interacts with universal welfare state logics, (national) philosophies of integration, and political opportunity structures in different policy sectors of immigrant integration. Whereas structural similarities in welfare state trajectories would make us expect to find great coherence in the way Nordic countries conceptualize and respond to immigration-related challenges, there is in fact significant variation. The countries’ institutional similarities provide a near-optimal setting to investigate if and how structural logics are mediated by ideas, which reflect historical path dependencies, about the nation, trust and societal cohesion, as well as the electoral logics of votes and office.